Tag Archives: flywheel

Enbridge Inc. is emerging as major corporate venturing partners in the Canadian cleantech scene. It has already acquired more than $3 billion in renewable energy assets — a combination of solar, wind, geothermal and run-of-river hydro. It has invested in concentrated solar PV manufacturer Morgan Solar and hydrogen tech firm Hydrogenics. It has pursued innovative waste-heat capture at its compressor stations in combination with fuel cell technology. Now, it is throwing its financial support behind flywheel storage innovator Temporal Power.

Temporal, based in Mississauga, Ontario, announced this week it has completed a $10 million Series B equity financing, with Enbridge Emerging Technology Inc. one of the lead investors along with Northwater Intellectual Property Fund (which was also lead investor in the company’s Series A financing in July 2011). Northwater Capital, it should be noted, is the money behind NRStor, a company with plans to develop Canada’s first energy storage park. NRStor, using Temporal Power flywheels, has already won a contract with Ontario’s Independent Electricity System Operator, which will see the flywheels being used to provide regulation services on the provincial grid. Annette Verschuren, former CEO of Home Depot Canada, is heading up the NRStor initiative.

Temporal Power describes its flywheel technology as a “quantum leap forward” because of its capability of storing 50 times more energy than most flywheels and enabling a power output that is five times higher per unit than its nearest grid-scale competitor. “Using its proprietary flywheel energy storage technology, Temporal Power’s scalable power storage plants offer utilities and power generation companies the ability to deliver efficient and cost-effective fast response capabilities for balancing energy and improving power quality on the electrical grid,” the company said in a statement.

Globe and Mail today has a nice summary of the various energy storage initiatives going on in Ontario — from conventional pumped storage to Temporal’s flywheels and advanced compressed-air energy storage.

Calling it an “important milestone” in the evolution of Ontario’s electricity system, Paul Murphy, the president and chief executive of Ontario’s Independent Electricity System Operator, announced Thursday that energy and process storage technologies would be added to the mix of options available to provide regulation services to the province’s grid — that is, keeping supply and demand on the grid in constant balance, second-by-second. To start, the IESO has contracted to add 10 megawatts of regulation services to the mix via a combination of flywheel energy storage, battery storage and “process storage” — the latter being the by-the-second control of many industrial loads as a way to rapidly reduce and ramp up grid demand. It’s sometimes called aggregated demand-response.

It’s a first for Ontario, which until now has relied largely on electricity generation assets, such as natural gas-fired power plants, to provide grid-balancing services. The gradual integration of fast-reacting storage technologies will help reduce our reliance on fossil fuel generation. According to the IESO, “This quick response is becoming increasingly important to facilitate more renewable resources like wind and solar, whose output is variable in nature.”

Through competitive tender, three firms have been contracted to supply this first round of alternative regulation services. Toronto-based Enbala Power Networks will provide 4 megawatts of process storage, which will come from water plants, cold storage facilities, universities, hospitals, and any other industrial, commercial or institutional facilities that have large power loads that can be flexibly used and easily controlled — such as pumps, fans and refrigeration units. For more than a year, Enbala has been supplying its service to PJM Interconnection, which is the regional system operator for 13 U.S. states and one district in the U.S. northeast.

Another 2 megawatts will come through NRStor, which through a partnership with flywheel developer Temporal Power and Ontario Power Generation will integrated flywheel technology into the Ontario grid for the first time. The balance will come from RES Canada, part of renewable energy developer RES Group, which will construct a battery-based storage system in southwestern Ontario (home to many wind farms).

While the numbers are small — 10 megawatts is just a pimple on a elephant’s butt — it finally puts non-hydro storage on the map in Ontario, opening the door for more technologies and approaches, and ultimately many more megawatts and fewer emissions.

A Burlington, Ontario-based startup called Temporal Power is the focus of my Clean Break column in today’s Toronto Star. Temporal has designed a stationary flywheel energy storage system that it claims can dramatically outperform the next-best system on the market, which you might say comes from Mass.-based Beacon Power. The company has filed patents on the system but they have yet to become public — likely in a few months. Until then, the company is keeping quiet about how it achieves its claimed performance, and I don’t blame them given the competitive pressures. The story behind how the company came about, however, is interesting. And if Temporal can convincingly demonstrate what it claims, it could prove a breakthrough for economical grid-scale energy storage.

For a good primer and innovation update on flywheel energy storage systems, check out this recent story in the Washington Post. My column also explains the basics of how the systems work and the challenges of making them efficient and economical.

So what does Temporal claim? The company says it has designed a system with zero parasitic losses and extremely low friction using relatively simple and easily available components. It uses permanent magnets, not electromagnets, but the overall integration of components is largely a mystery — for now. It claims its flywheel will lose less than 5 per cent of its energy after up to 10 hours of spinning, making it ideal for storing energy from a wind farm in the evening and dispatching it hours later when the power is needed. This is a departure for flywheel systems, which are typically used for short-term energy backup and services such as grid regulation.

The company plans to standardize on 50-kilowatt-hour units, double the size of the main Beacon model, and these systems could be grouped together to achieve a larger scale of energy storage. It already has a working 20-kilowatt-hour prototype. Its first demonstration is likely to be a 10-flywheel project deployed in Hydro One’s distribution network, where the technology will absorb fluctuations from nearby wind turbines in an area of the grid that has strained capacity. The project is partially funded by a grant from Sustainable Development Technology Canada.

I’ve already received a couple of e-mails from skeptics who say flywheels have been researched for years and what Temporal is claiming can’t possibly be done, at least not economically and reliably. I always get a kick out of these knee-jerk, borderline arrogant reactions, usually by engineers who think they’re smarter than everyone else and that anything new can’t be true because, if it was, it would have already been done. I like to keep an open mind. No doubt, others will question the fact Temporal isn’t explaining in detail how it can do what it claims, but really folks, why would it reveal its secret sauce at this point? Why would it risk erasing a competitive edge prematurely?

Anyway, skepticism is a good thing, as long as it doesn’t degenerate into outright uninformed dismissal.